Web 2point2 Site Live – Join Us
Posted by cheuer in Social Media Club, Web22, Web2point2 on October 9th, 2006
I have lots more to post there, but am starting to drag, so wanted to get out a quick post that says the Web 2point2 site is live, though without the main Blog posts I need to write still. It has been a long day learning the new WordPress theme called Subtle from Glued Ideas (these folks rock – thanks for the great theme). I was also getting deeper into some plugins and finding errors on other sites I manage that still need to be fixed.
Web 2point2 Sponsors???
Posted by cheuer in BrainJams, Unconferences, Web22 on October 6th, 2006
I have talked with several of y’all about sponsoring and/or attending the upcoming Web 2point2 unconference (tag is web22 btw) happening on November 9 and 10, so now is the time to do something about it. If you are still interested in sponsoring, please send me a note and a logo to one of my email addresses so I can include your support in the launched version of the site which I will most definitely be completing on Sunday.
You can also register for $32.95 (plus a small service charge) which includes a t-shirt, 2 lunches and access to the Web 2point2 Release Party, which will be a blowout on Thursday night November 9. Special thanks to Dave Winer who unbeknownst to me was on an email thread circulated by the lovely Miss Grace and who blogged about it on Scripting News, also becoming the first paying participant. Nice.
His quote was perfect, embodying the true spirit of the event
“Like all the cool kids, I’ll be at Web 2.2, November 9-10 in San Francisco. Like the web, it’s open to everyone”
More details coming very soon, but please do know that space is limited, nothing I can do about physics…
David Sifry Good, Service Still Not
Posted by cheuer in New Media Release, SocialMedia, SocialMediaRelease on October 6th, 2006
Thank you David Sifry for responding to my blog post about my trouble with Technorati and having your engineers take care of my primary concern regarding the Technorati rank being broken for this blog, chrisheuer.com, but you have a bigger problem on your hands then just a colo server move and you need to let people know what is really going on and what you are really doing to address the problems rather than patching on complaints one person at a time (I will be glad to talk to you on the phone BTW, but please note my prior post).
While this one issue was fixed, almost all other parts of the Technorati page about my blog are still way off. In addition to the problems that my fiancee told me about upon my return with not being able to get Technorati customer support to respond to her problems, numerous other people who don’t want to go public with this problem have privately told me about similar frustrations. I like you David, and know you are a stand up guy with good intentions, but I dont understand why you guys can’t get these problems fixed with the money you raised over the past few years. I would like to believe it is a server move causing it, but it really seems like a much deeper problem given how long this has been going on and the pattern of problems we have all experienced over the years.
David must have seen my complaint, and like Rick Klau does regularly for FeedBurner – responded by having his engineers fix at least one part of the broken bit (my technorati rank is now 40,181 (147 links from 68 blogs) and personally responded on my previous post. However, it says it was updated 2 hours ago (correct), but the most recent post listed is from 118 days ago. Also, the most recent outbound links are from a magnolia blog bling link? The popular tags are way off, I can’t even imagine how they came up with that mishmash of a ranking on the tag strength.
When I interviewed Rick Klau for They Get It, a Social Media Club podcast to be published this weekend, he had said to me something that has been nagging at me all week – “when a Blogger complains and a company does something right about it, the Blogger owes it to the company to point that out too.” So David, I am sorry for not getting this up sooner and I am thankful for your personal response, but more sorry to report it still does not work and I don’t suspect you can really fix it by the end of the server move (please prove me wrong). I did however photoblog the reponse right away on Flickr, so I don’t think I was unfair, just slow.
As I said, I like the folks behind the service (and know several socially), but after all this time and all this money, the service should be working normally and it is not. They can not afford to do customer support on issues like this for everyone that cares about this service or they will certainly go bankrupt or provide dismal service as they have done with my fiancee. While I appreciate David taking the time to respond, I also know he should be spending his time on finding innovative solutions to the company’s problems. I fear that they have little time left to get this together and save their reputation/credibility but few people are really complaining about it, which is odd – perhaps it is like those other silicon valley darlings that no one is willing to publicly criticize. It seems that no one really ever wants to point out the pink elephant in the middle of the living room…
The recent design changes at Technorati are great improvements and I am certainly a supporter of their efforts with Microformats due to our work with the Social Media Release, but if they can not get their core indexing and data infrastructure stable, all the remodeling on a shaky foundation won’t hold up the walls when a strong wind blows. I am not switching to IceRocket yet (not even linking to them), but may need to change my habits finally if I can no longer trust Technorati is accuracte. As Greg Narain said when we were beercasting with John from Swinecast, “no one is fooled when you throw lipstick on a pig” or a pink elephant for that matter… (btw – just thinking about that South Park episode at least brought a smile to my face)
Too Many People to Talk to…
I don’t know how Robert Scoble manages to do it. I barely have 1/4 of 1% of his notoriety (probably a lot less then that actually) but I spend most of my working day talking to people – on the phone, on Skype and in meetings. My down time lately is 20 minutes on the Muni trains where I am listening to Ben Harper, Better Than Ezra, DMB or Radiohead and playing Texas Hold’em on my iPod (OK Kristie, that is one of my guilty pleasures I suppose).
So if I owe you a call, or an email, as I do with so many of my good friends and new colleagues – I am very sorry we have not connected yet. It is truly important to me, I just don’t have the time in the day to do everything I need to do and am a bit behind working hard to catch up.
1and1 Doesn’t Get It – Avoid Them
I have been using 1and1 for the past year or so as my hosting provider for one reason really, I get to host all my domains and point them to their own sites without having to pay on a per domain basis except for the $6 per year registration fee and my $20 per month. Everyone has warned me that they really sucked, but the only time I encountered that was when trying to get some technical support a while back. Overall, the server I was on has been stable and I have not had any problems with response times. Of course, it goes without saying that this was until tonight. Just now actually, as I sit on hold listening to – and I kid you not, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, into the future”
So what did they do to warrant this warning to everyone to avoid ever using 1and1 hosting services. Their entire administrative control system has been down the better part of the day, as was the webmail interface for all my accounts, which I have been relying on this evening since forgetting my power cord at the office. The almost funny part is how poorly their customer service is set up. I really felt sorry for the poor canuck on the other end of the berating I was serving up, but I am really fuming that the only answer to my questions about what is going on was “we are waiting for the update from the administrators.”
When asked if my credit card data had been compromised in a hacking incident, he suggested I call the billing department or send an email to support (as if they ever answered support emails during normal situations). When asked about what was affected and what was going in, he continued to insist he was waiting for the latest update. So I asked him what the last update was – he put me on hold for about 8 minutes (not bad considering I expected to wait for a few hours) and came back to tell me the same story. It is a real shame to go through this right now with all the stuff going on, but I think it is about time to switchover to someone else as soon as I can.
I guess the old saying about getting scammed is really true – “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is…”
Credited on Valleywag…
Posted by cheuer in Leadership, SocialMedia on October 2nd, 2006
Just wanted to point out that this photo got picked up on Valleywag (just as Jason Calcanis predicted shortly after he uttered those words attributed to him in the quote). While Jason is indeed pretty bombastic and can be somewhat offputting to most people (including me on at least one occasion) – I do appreciate that he can say it like it is – at least to him. He will often say the things that other people only think, or say in very private conversations. I respect him for that just as I respect Jeremy Peper for the same sort of attitude, even when I disagree with their opinion.
I wonder what it would be like if they could take that same approach with a dose of sugar instead of vinegar and a little more repsect of everyday folks in the process. But I guess if either of them suffered fools gladly, they wouldn’t be who they are, so if for that reason alone I for one am glad to hear their voice as part of the conversation.
Technorati Still Broken After All This Time
Posted by cheuer in SocialMedia on September 30th, 2006
Now, I generally like Technorati and the people behind it. Which is why I emailed both Tantek Celik and Dave Sifry over the course of the last 2 weeks to see if they might be able to explain why this is so far off. But they never responded and I am finally going to write about it. I have written about their problems before, last year when we realized there were problems with technorati on many levels. They have since culled their staff, increased their server capacities and supposeduly fixed a lot of problems, but it seems that it has not by evidence of the screen shot here and the link to a search for this blog.
Technorati says that my Rank is 305,618 (14 links from 10 blogs), but right underneath it says 150 links (which is actually a lot less than what is out there really) and that it was last updated 112 days ago, even though I updated it the other day and do ping them from this blog when it updates with a new post.
Now it might be just my vanity, but given Dave Sifry’s folksy story about the reason for building Technorati being to serve his vanity, he should be more conscious of making sure it is accurate. Or perhaps responding to emails from people on the Z List, or C List, if I may be so bold…
Are they ever going to become a reliable source for the blogosphere’s search and influence needs?
I decided to write it up after my podcast interview with Rick Klau today about proactive customer support and how companies should be dealing with reputation management and engaging with their customers. I gave them the chance to respond to me directly, but they did not. If this was Feedburner, I would have heard from them and it would have been fixed by now, but clearly Technorati is no Feedburner.
links for 2006-09-29
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This article supports a blog post I am writing now called “From Social Media to Corporte Media” which is also the title of an event by the same name we are putting on Monday October 23, 2006 in Palo Alto, CA
links for 2006-09-28
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Good, but older piece on online communities – food for thought
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Chris Heuer is the founder of Mentor Bureau, a global collaborative of Startup Mentors focused on #SmoothScaling over #Hypergrowth. He has invested his life in working to create a better society through personal and community efforts that brings people together such as Rysing Tyde and Social Media Club. To learn more about Chris, visit his profile on LinkedIn.